A Secret Life (29 page)
Authors: Benjamin Weiser
Tags: #History, #Europe, #Germany, #World, #True Crime, #Espionage
That night, during a reception in Moscow in honor of the tentative agreement, Podgorney rose and raised his glass. He gave a series of toasts, to the Communist Party, party leaders Leonid Brezhnev and Edward Gierek, Defense Ministers Ustinov and Jaruzelski, and others.
“I want to raise one more toast,” he then said. “We respect Poland. Poland stood behind us, supported us. We respect our friends.” He said he was proud that Poland had backed his country in wartime. “We admire our friends who support us.
“But we also respect our enemy,” Podgorney continued, offering a toast to the health of “Comrade Colonel Kuklinski,” who he said had a bright future and was so highly respected by his superiors. “We know that he is not with us, but against us. Despite this, let us drink to his posterity.”
Kuklinski, who had been sitting impassively, was stunned. The Polish air defense commander smiled grimly. The next morning, Kuklinski and the other negotiators were summoned to a meeting with an enraged Kulikov, who ranted about Poland’s obstinacy on the air defense issue and said he was canceling the agreements reached by his own staff. Then, as Kuklinski and the others watched, Kulikov grabbed his telephone and spoke to Jaruzelski in Warsaw.
“Everyone wants a statute for time of war, and while they are at it, to put obstacles in my way,” Kulikov snarled. “Everyone agrees that there should be one command, only everyone wants to be in command!”
Kulikov told Jaruzelski that further negotiations would be fruitless. It was clear Jaruzelski was backpedaling.
“Yep. Yep. Yep,” Kulikov snapped. He turned to Kuklinski and held up the phone. “Listen to your boss,” Kulikov said. “We’ve reached full agreement.” Jaruzelski had conceded on every point.
Kuklinski was angry when he returned to Warsaw. He told Siwicki about the critical toast by the Soviet general and asked whether he should resign because it might be hard for him to deal with the Soviets in the future. Siwicki laughed it off and said the Russians probably criticized him, Siwicki, even more than Kuklinski; and he should just ignore it.
Throughout the fall, the CIA had been refining its exfiltration plans for Kuklinski and his family. On November 12 headquarters prepared an updated version of the instructions and cabled it to Warsaw for delivery. The document said that if Kuklinski ever felt he was in imminent danger, he should proceed immediately to the American Embassy. “We are prepared to receive you day or night at any time,” the CIA wrote. If he arrived between 6:00 A.M. and midnight, he should enter the compound by the open driveway gate.
If you do come after midnight, you should use the entrance to Piekna 14b, to the east of the driveway, because the lock on the door of this entrance was damaged during recent renovations. A new lock has been installed. We have included a key in this package which will open the new lock. Please throw the old key in the river or return it at our next exchange.
He was told to prepare a short note in English identifying himself as Jack Strong. “If you are stopped by anyone in the embassy compound, this note will assure that you are immediately taken to the Marines at the Piekna entrance.”
13
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Meanwhile, the CIA was studying ways to speed up communications with Kuklinski in the event he had to make an emergency escape or report critical news. One form of technology under development, known as Discus, was an electronic transmitting device that would enable Kuklinski to send short encrypted messages to a receiving unit in the American Embassy or carried elsewhere by a Warsaw-based officer. One September 5, 1979, cable from Warsaw Station to headquarters pointed out that the complex system of signals with chalk marks on lampposts or electrical boxes required at least a thirty-six-hour turnaround. “Gull learns of imminent hostilities one morning. He makes signal at ‘Szkola’ that night, and we retrieve his package [the] next night,” the cable said. It all took too long. The cable noted that when Discus eventually “goes into operation, this ‘early warning’ time should be cut to almost zero.”
By the late fall, Burggraf, Gilbertson, and Dwyer were in place. Dwyer, the most recent arrival, was living in Warsaw with his wife and infant son. Because he had not been in Warsaw for six months, he was not yet allowed to make exchanges with sources and had completed only one operational act in the Gull case: He had erased a chalk mark.
Dwyer had spent most of his time studying surveillance and casing for operational sites. On the night of November 25, Dwyer drove to retrieve a package that he had left on the ground for a source (not Kuklinski) but that had not been picked up. The source had volunteered his services to the Americans relatively recently, and his bona fides were not yet established.
Dwyer arrived at the site in his 1979 Italian Fiat, which had American diplomatic plates, and picked up the package, which had been left in the grass along a one-way street. As he began to pull away, he saw an unmarked car turn the wrong way out of a driveway before him and head in his direction. Hearing the wail of sirens, Dwyer began to slow down. He knew he had been ambushed. A half dozen police cars appeared, and as they surrounded him, Dwyer managed to toss the miniature earpiece he wore for countersurveillance out the window into the tall grass by the side of the road. He then reached down and stuffed under the seat the package he had retrieved and a transistor radio he kept beside him as a backup to listen for SB surveillance.
Within seconds, he was ordered out of the car at gunpoint and was surrounded by SB agents. One held a gun under his chin as another frisked him. The agents also took the package he had put under the seat. Then he was pushed into the back of a car and driven to a militia headquarters where he was interrogated and held for about ten hours in an office whose most notable feature, he would later recall, was a bust of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the Polish-born founder of the KGB, which sat at eye level on a bookshelf glaring at him.
“I am an American diplomat, my name is Michael Dwyer, and I have the right to contact my embassy,” he said repeatedly, refusing to answer other questions as a camera rolled. The Poles, who were desperate for American grain and loan assistance, did not mistreat Dwyer while they held him.
It was clear that the source had at some point come under the control of the SB, and that the site had been under surveillance for some time. At about 3:00 A.M., Dwyer’s frightened wife, who was at home with their son, called the embassy to say her husband had not yet come home. The next day, in an open telephone conversation that the Americans knew would be overheard by Polish intelligence, an embassy official told Washington that Dwyer was being withdrawn. He was released, and two days later, he and his family left Poland.
There was nothing good about being “wrapped up,” Dwyer later recalled, but at least he knew that while Polish officials were celebrating the arrest of a CIA officer who had been in Poland for all of three months, they were being diverted from the greater intelligence coup: Gull, who had been working against them for seven years, was stealing them blind.
In early December, the Warsaw Pact defense ministers committee met in Poland under the leadership of Jaruzelski. During the session, the members, with the exception of the Romanians, voted to approve the wartime statutes, the first step to ratification. Afterward, Kulikov offered lavish praise for Jaruzelski, and Soviet Defense Minister Ustinov embraced him, saying, “Wojciech, you have made a historic and distinguished contribution for the Soviet Union.” Jaruzelski’s face turned ashen. Kuklinski sensed that he was embarrassed at being honored in front of his fellow Poles for helping the Soviets.
Even Kulikov’s anger at Kuklinski seemed forgotten by the time the Soviet delegation prepared to depart. In a farewell address on December 6 in the military sector of the Warsaw Okecie International Airport, Kulikov praised Kuklinski and wished him well.
On December 16, Kuklinski wrote to the CIA and to Daniel. He felt drained by the negotiations over the wartime statutes. “My thirteen-man crew had to be in two or three places at once in order to cope with everything connected with this task,” he wrote. Kuklinski, citing the sixty-six Americans taken hostage in Iran the previous month, asked whether any of them were people he had worked with.
I am stunned by this act of illegality, violence and impudent provocation, obscured beneath the spiritual leadership of Khomeini, who is striving not only to turn back the historical course of his own society but also to bury everything which mankind has been able to achieve in its natural, civilized development.
In a package for the CIA, Kuklinski included official photographs taken at the conclusion of the meetings of defense ministers in Warsaw. “I am enclosing them with the view that they record an unprecedented moment in the history of military alliances, when conditions were approved which, in their essence, result in the transfer of the inalienable national rights of the Warsaw Pact countries to make decisions on peace and war into the hands of a foreign power, the USSR.”
Kuklinski also enclosed the final negotiated version of the statute.
All sides (unfortunately!!!) with the exception of the Romanians approved the draft of the statute. In keeping with the prearranged tactic, everyone opposed the Romanian proposals, including the suggestion that further consultations be held in 1980 with the goal of reaching a solution which all members of the Warsaw Pact would be able to accept. And so this infamous document was approved for ratification.
Kuklinski responded to earlier questions from the CIA concerning the T-72 tank’s ability to penetrate NATO tank armor. “At the price of repetition,” Kuklinski wrote, “I would like to ask you to handle carefully the information relayed by me. Any sort of press and journalistic reports in the West are the subject of detailed analyses and investigation.”
He said that despite the considerable tension of “this double-life,” he was optimistic about the future. In addition to sending holiday greetings to Daniel, he wrote, “I extend my expression of highest respect and regard for the American citizens in Iran as well as the hope for their release.”
After an aborted attempt to make a delivery on December 16, 1979, Kuklinski carried out a successful exchange two days later. His films contained more than 830 images (the list of documents he sent ran eleven pages.)
The CIA’s package included a list of proposed new exchange sites and an enthusiastic commentary on his previous delivery, which included one thousand pages of documents from the Soviet General Staff Academy on Soviet front offensive operations. Calling the information “an outstanding addition to your previous contributions on this subject,” the agency said it would provide “our intelligence community with significant new information and insight regarding Soviet doctrine and tactics, particularly in the field of nuclear operations, combat employment of front rocket troops, etc.” Kuklinski received the updated exfiltration instructions and the embassy key. There also was a note from Stanley Patkowski, the retiring translator, thanking him for the pen.
“Dear and esteemed colleague,” Patkowski wrote. “I have been deeply moved by the words of your message and the wonderful gift. It [is] one of [the] most treasured gifts I have ever received.”
Patkowski said he was sending a present to Kuklinski. It was a small flask, used as a canteen by Allied paratroopers who dropped into Poland during the Nazi occupation in World War II. This flask, Patkowski wrote, was one of the last of the originals in existence.
There were several score of them. Therefore, it is possible that such specimens could still be found in Poland.Its contents―a bit of French cognac.I would like to add that my work with you, Sir, will remain in my memory as a chapter of my life shared with one of the most distinguished Poles whose efforts and achievements are not limited to Polish interests alone, but are measured on a global scale.With a sincere Polish handshake.
8
“OUT OF THE SHADOWS OF DARKNESS”
IN A WELL-LIT CORNER suite on the fourth floor at Langley, a group of CIA translators came to work each morning, picked up folders in rooms lined with locked file cabinets, and spent the day hunched over desks in two offices, both sealed with two locks. They were the Russian and Polish translators who handled the Gull material, which, as one CIA analyst recalled, was “curling the hair of the analysts in the intelligence community.” The two groups of translators knew each other, but they were barred from discussing their work and did not know they were translating material from the same human source.
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